RConversation

Beyond the Tsunami

(Posted on Saturday at Personaldemocracy.)

The role of blogs and other forms of online citizen's media in spreading first-hand accounts of the tsunami disaster and in mobilizing relief aid has been phenomenal. Bloggers deserve to pat themselves handily on the back.

Bloggers rock. OK. Now what?

Can this new model of citizen-journalism and aid coordination be extended to disasters and human tragedies that don’t get so much mainstream media attention?

What can we do for Darfur, other victims of war and famine in Africa, and AIDS victims? What can we do for the victims of yearly natural disasters - earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, doughts, etc. - for whom U.N. agencies have such trouble raising money?

How can we help organizations like Doctors Without Borders bring aid every day to the millions around the world in danger of dying deaths every bit as tragic as the tsunami victims? What can we do for the suffering people of North Korea?

As Suzanne Scholte of the North Korea Freedom Coalition points out: “the deaths caused by last month's Tsunami are less than 5% of the deaths caused by Kim Jong-il's man-made famine disaster and the deaths in the political prison camps. In other words Kim Jong-il and his policies have killed 22 times the number of people that perished as a result of the Tsunami."

What about places like Myanmar (formerly Burma)? Or Kazakhstan, or other places we never hear about? Or anti-democratic practices in places like Pakistan - with which the U.S. government has good relations?

How can we help people like Human Rights Watch bring more urgent attention to the fact that so many people on this planet are dying every day at the hands of their fellow human beings, while our media is more interested in Michael Jackson and Lacey Peterson? Do we only care about Tibet when Richard Gere talks about it or Hollywood makes a movie?

How can we help environmental activists prevent the deaths of many millions more due to environmental mismanagement? How can we help the majority of ordinary, peaceloving moderate citizens of the Middle East keep extremists and terrorists from grabbing all the headlines and dominating politics?

This is what we need to figure out. Worldchanging is working on that question. So is the Digital Divide Network, and new Global Voices movement. And Bloggers Without Borders. So are people at the Open Society Institute, so is the OneVoice movement. And many many others. Now is the time for cyber-activists to reach out to the old fashioned bricks-and-mortar activists who have been toiling for decades trying to bring more attention to human rights abuses, civil wars, environmental outrages, urgent public health problems and constant natural disasters – most of which have never been the mainstream media’s breaking-story-of-the-month.

As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out in his blog attention research, bloggers have one big failing right now: we are much too inclined to take our cues from mainstream media when deciding what we blog about – and thus what we and our friends should care about.

At Bloggercon III, a group of us got excited about building something called BloggerCorps – a service that would help activists and non-profit/non-governmental organizations find volunteer bloggers in their area who can help seasoned real-world activists make the most of the new tools for cyber-organizing and online citizen journalism. We are still trying to figure out the best way to do this technically (see links here and here). But we believe this is important. It’s time for civil society to set the agenda for media attention. Until now it has been the other way around. And that’s just wrong.

BloggerCorps is born!

Bloggercorps is simple. It's a blog.

No office. No admin. No fund-raising. No funds. No staff. No meetings.

It will evolve organically based on the needs of the people who wind up using it.

For starters, here's the plan:

- The authors (a wide-ranging group comprised mainly of bloggers, activists, and tech organizations who work with non-profits) will post announcements on behalf of organizations who need help starting blogs or building blogging communities. 

- The posts will be categorized according to the organization's geographical location, and in some cases its main focus issue. 

- Bloggers interested in helping that particular organization can express their interest in the comments section attached to that post.

- The organization will then decide which of the volunteers it wants to follow up with.

- All arrangements will be made directly between organizations and bloggers. Bloggercorps will not mediate.

- We are not raising money to put people on planes so in most cases the idea is to match organizations located in a particular place with bloggers living in the same place. 

- If situations arise in which organizations cannot find volunteers living in their area, we may be able to point them to foundations or philanthropic organizations who might be in a position to help fund travel for blogger-volunteers. But we won't do your fundraising work for you.

- Bloggercorps is non-partisan.

Check it out.

Update: NPO blog aggregator project

Thanks to everybody for the enthusiastic response, links and suggestions for the non-profit/activist blog aggregator project. It appears that several groups have been playing around with the idea. My last blog post on the subject seems to have brought everybody together into one conversation. Now we just need to figure out what tools we're going to use, where its going to be hosted, etc. Then hopefully it will move forward from there. So stay tuned and watch this space!!

Blogger Corps?

At various sessions of Bloggercon III, I opined that we need to think more about how blogging tools and the blogging process can be used by the non-profit and activist community - not only in the U.S. but around the world.  This is not merely a matter of blog-evangelizing to the uninitiated.  It's also about adapting blog tools and blogging techniques to the needs of people who want to go beyond online conversations to real-world action. For early blog-adopters, blogging was an end in itself. For the activist community, blogging has to be an effective means to a concrete end. 

In the final wrap-up session of Bloggercon III, I suggested that socially conscious members of the blogging community (of all political persuasions) might want to organize a "Blogger Corps." Through it, bloggers could donate their time to help poorly funded activists or non-profit groups to figure out what blogging tools are right for them, set up blogs, and develop effective blogging strategies. 

The response to this idea was enthusiastic. A few people have contacted me, asking how they can help. I do not have any detailed master plan. I just came up with the idea at B-con and blurted it out. So I turn to the blogosphere (and the non-profit world) for suggestions: what do you think would be the most effective and efficient way to organize a Blogger Corps? Please share your ideas in the "comments" section.